Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
-
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
-
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
-
Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
-
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
-
But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.
-
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
-
There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
-
To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
-
You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
-
The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.
-
The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
-
The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
-
Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
-
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
-
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
-
Live with no time-out.
-
He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
-
To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
-
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
-
When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."
-
I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
-
Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
-
If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.